Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/41

No. 1.] come to be. What I have in mind is not, however, the influence of earlier upon later, but a different relation, which we must now try to describe.

If one were to assert the complete determination of the later by the earlier, this would amount to declaring that the earlier contains the later, wrapped up within itself. And thus we could say that the very first stage of an individual history is virtually the whole life. Everything is there, folded up in that earliest stage; and what we call the living is simply the unrolling of a scroll upon which all the characters are already inscribed. But instead of saying that the earlier thus contains the later, one might reverse the procedure and say that the later contains the earlier. In our ordinary conception of the individual human life, we think of its various stages as so many different parts of it. The whole life would thus be the sum total of these stages. But from the point of view that we wish now to suggest, the life is to be regarded as a unity in a sense that makes the whole something other than this. We can perhaps best express our meaning by saying that the final stage in the history of a human being—assuming for the nonce that there is a final stage—is not a part of that history, but the whole; that it gathers up into itself and keeps in existence the entire past, which but for its maintaining power would be dead and gone. It is only with reference to the future, never with reference to the past, that we could speak of the present moment in a life as one of its parts. My present is my whole life, so far as that life has yet been lived; it is a part only in the sense that it, in its turn, will be taken up and preserved in what we call a later stage. According to this way of regarding the matter, the earlier stage is one with the later, not merely in so far as it is preserved in memory, not merely by virtue of the subtle influence of past thoughts and deeds upon present character and conduct, but also because the later stage is the earlier, the earlier enlarged, enriched, transformed.

This way of looking at the matter emphasizes the unitary character of the individual life. But it should not be confused with the doctrine that the human life is essentially a timeless